We’re excited to announce Jason Denzel’s Mystic trilogy will be published by Tor Books! Denzel is the founder of Dragonmount, a community and news site dedicated to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Founded in 1998, the site provides news, forums, discussion groups, role-playing, and a podcast, as well as a hub for Twitter and Facebook communities, email, and games. It is now the largest and best-known WoT site.

Denzel's first novel will be published this fall. Read more about the series and check out the full cover image for Mystic below!

Pan Macmillan has just announced the shortlist for the first annual James Herbert Award for Horror Writing! Celebrating work “from the darkly fantastical and post-apocalyptic to desolate rural mysteries, gut-wrenching body horrors and modern re-imaginings of classic horror tropes,” the shortlist represents a diverse array of writing from some of our favorite writers.

It’s cold outside. There’s snow fluttering through the air, the sun is swallowed by that jerk serpent by like 3:30 in the afternoon, and there are never enough layers, it sucks. But at least we’re not on Gethen!

We defrosted our fingers long enough to type a question of Twitter: what books capture winter for you? And the beautiful snowmisers of the internet responded with an avalanche of suggestions!

Edgar Allan Poe gave American writers permission to plumb the subterranean depths of human depravity and transform it into art. This may sound obvious, but it’s worth remembering—on his 206th birthday—that Poe composed his pioneering gothic stories for a Yankee audience. Europeans already indulged in the profane poetry of Charles Baudelaire (Poe’s French translator) and attended the bloody spectacle of Grand Guignol theater so it’s no wonder they embraced the graveyard poet before America, whose prudish shores had never read anything like him.

Pan Macmillan has acquired the UK rights to Sorcerer to the Crown, the start of a new trilogy from debut author Zen Cho.

Pan Macmillan's Senior Commissioning editor Bella Pagan is excited for the trilogy, saying “Sorcerer to the Crown is warm, clever and witty. I just adored the characters, their dilemmas and the lively world Zen Cho has created. It’s very special and I just can’t wait to share this wonderful book with as many readers as possible.”

Today marks the 75th birthday of celebrated and influential author and editor Michael John Moorcock. Involving himself in the SF/Fantasy scene practically as soon as he discovered it, Moorcock began editing Tarzan Adventures in 1957 when he was just 17. His love of high adventure, such as the work of Leigh Brackett and Edgar Rice Burroughs, influenced not only his early editorial work but also his own writing.

He is often self-deprecating about his style, saying in the introduction to Elric: The Stealer of Souls:

“I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I’d rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas”

As we come to the end of 2014, we’re looking back on this year’s books, and asking ourselves some important questions: which ones were our favorites? Why did some resonate more than others? And what do our picks say about the state of SFF as we head into 2015? We took to Twitter to ask the hivemind for their best of the year, and you responded with a wonderful avalanche of reading suggestions! While there were too many for one post, we’ve gathered up twenty five of your picks in the non-scientific and non-comprehensive-because-seriously-2014-ain’t-even-over list below!

One of the things you get used to as a fantasy fan is that each new book is a commitment. Some people commit to other people, marriages, children, careers.... When fantasy fans start a new book, they do it knowing that they may still have to be reading about these characters 20 years later.

As a guide for those who maybe want a fling rather than a marriage, we asked Twitter to suggest standalone fantasies, and you did not disappoint: From Goblin Emperors to Fox Women to Raven Kings, here are 17 of your favorites!

Ideally, shortly after we’ve learned to read we’d all be fitted with a pair of magical (or high-tech) glasses that act as the visual equivalent of Babelfish, and we’d be able to read anything we wanted, no translation required. Alas, we’re not quite there yet, but in the interests of acting as pseudo-Babels, we’ve compiled a list of SFF works from around the world that you can find translated into English. Some of these came from readers suggestions, some of them are Tor.com favorites, and all of them are fantastic. Let us know if we missed any other favorites in the comments!

Robert Jackson Bennett—the award-winning author of American Elsewhere, The Troupe, The Company Man, and Mr. Shivers—recently took to reddit to answer your questions! His latest, City of Stairs, is an atmospheric and intrigue-filled spy novel complete with dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city. The novel is available now in the US (Crown Publishing) and publishes October 2nd in the UK (Jo Fletcher Books).

The novel follows Callum Hunt, a young man who tries his best to fail the magical test known as the Iron Trial. If he passes, he must join the Magisterium, against his father’s wishes and his own will...

The book’s co-authors hopped onto Twitter recently for an Apple iBooks chat about how their friendship affected their writing process, and we’ve gathered the highlights below!

Steven Erikson has so much to tell us, reddit could barely contain it all! He’s nearing the end of the second novel in the Kharkanas trilogy, Fall of Light, which he hopes to finish “sometime in the next two months.” Plus, he took a break from working on that book to write a seventy-five thousand word Star Trek spoof called Willful Child (read an excerpt here). From the author himself:

“So here you all thought I’d spend this time writing and talking about Fantasy novels, huh? Wrong. This Trekker’s come out of the wardrobe closet, in public for the first time! Eat tribbles and die!”

In his comprehensive AMA, Erikson talked about Willful Child, the intricacies of Malazan, and his overall writing process. He also mentioned that he’ll be appearing at next year’s World Fantasy Awards Con in Saratoga Springs, so mark your calendars now!

Kameron Hurley, author of the new epic fantasy The Mirror Empire, took part in a rousing AMA over on Reddit! Hurley is a two-time Hugo Award winner, a Kitschy Award-winner for Best Debut Novel, and a Sydney J. Bounds Award-winner for Best Newcomer. Her other novels include The God’s War Trilogy, a science fiction noir series. She’s a fan of great scotch, Chipotle, bad 80’s action movies, and books about war and genocide!

John Scalzi took to Twitter in conjunction with Apple iBooks for a chat during Tuesday afternoon, answering questions about his new novel, Lock In under the hashtag #AskScalzi. Apple started things off, asking questions about Scalzi’s blog, the ideas behind Lock In, and the possibilities of a follow up! Then they turned things over to the fans, who asked about everything from Old Man’s War to Redshirts. Check out the recap below, and head over to iBooks to order your copy of Lock In.

John Scalzi is celebrating the release of Lock In with a rousing game of Two Truths and a Lie! The game is simple: Scalzi tells three stories, and you guess which are the truths and which one is the big fat fib. Google Play is hosting the game, and that’s not all: they’re also offeringe-books of the whole Scalzi backlist for 50% off!

Check out the video below, and then head over to Google Play to guess play along and and pick up Lock In or one of Scalzi’s other fine titles!

Author Jaime Lee Moyer recently travelled the lands of reddit to hold an AMA! Her novels are about magic and murder, friendship, betrayal and kissing, and ghosts. Lots of ghosts. She grew up in San Francisco, where her ‘Gabe and Delia’ series is set, but now lives in Texas, where she maintains a “secret identity of Responsible Adult(tm).” Her first novel, the Columbus Literary Award-winning Delia’s Shadow, and its sequel, A Barricade in Hell, are available from Tor Books. The third book in the series, Against a Brightening Sky, will be released in 2015.

Moyer’s first story, written when she was eleven, caused controversy when her best friend’s mother “read it, frowned, and said, ‘This isn’t appropriate subject matter for a girl your age to write about.’ And with that, she walked away with my story in hand. She kept it! I never did get that story back. That was my very first rejection, and the moment I knew I was born to be a writer. I’ve been writing ever since.”

Check out more highlights from Moyer’s AMA below, including the reveal of what made that childhood story so scandalous!

Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire novels, is taking us to a new world with Uprooted! The story is a dark fairy tale, where a grim wizard defends villagers from the horrors of an enchanted Wood. In return? He demands ten years of service from a young girl of his choosing. Now the choosing is approaching, and a young woman named Agnieszka fears that her best friend, the lovely Kasia, will be taken. But what if the wizard makes a different choice?

Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.

Uprooted is the start of a new series from author Naomi Novik, look for it next June from Del Rey! You can find more info at the link below.